ZogBlog

Renn Fest was awesome as usual. The outfits are cool... but some women go just a bit overboard with the custumes that make their breasts look like jello that's about to squirt out of their tops.

One thing to note is that not only did I see a lot of tattoos on women (and men), but I saw a lot of women with TWO or MORE colors in their hair. Blondes, Browns, Reds, Purples, Pinks, Greens. It was simply incredible! And to think I had been told by a woman recently that I wouldn't see this happen in the US (like in Germany). I say to you: Hah! Not only are they doing it - but they look STUNNING.

Hell, I even got a Henna tattoo of a Dragon on my forearm. I even had a guy stop me and note how cool it was. Apparently, he too had been thinking about some tribal art... but he hadn't thought of a Dragon. His wife had already got her own Henna tattoo - but I never saw it. Naturally, the Dragon brand is in homage of Robert's Jordan's Wheel of Time. I am: the Dragon Reborn. :)

The whole trip (1hr, 15min and $17 for the ticket) was made worth while by the incredible performance of the The Acting Company in Macbeth. Scott Sophos as Macbeth was convincing as the soldier, the husband, and the disturbed one seeing visions. Sarah Melinda as Lady Macbeth was simply enchanting! When she convinced Macbeth to go through with the plot, I was convinced - and would have followed her into the pits of doom. After she turned on the charm, and Macbeth came for her... she was solid as a rock, and firm of purpose - despite her husbands hands examining what he had purchased by standing firm in their plot. The whole performance was superb.

Curious thing though to be at a Renaissance Festival and see this...

Do you see it? That's right - a crackberry!

What did I bring away from PDC2005?

Whidbey (Visual Studio 2005), aka VSTS is well on its way to release on November 7th, 2005. However, TFS (which will not be released in November) released a B3 this week on MSDN Downloads. We've all heard about .NET 2.0 (at PDC2003). Generics, Partial Classes, and in the past year we've learned about Team System (Architect, Developer & Tester) and Team Foundation Server.

Orcas (Visual Studio 2006/7) will be the XAML enabled IDE for Vista and will include a design surface that is fully CSS-aware. This design surface, Quartz, was unveiled as part of the Expression suite. Odd that they used the term Quartz, since Apple uses the term to refer to its desktop rendering modules (Quartz2D and Quartz Extreme).

ATLAS is still evolving and according to Shunta, ultimately the AJAX (XmlHttpRequest's) technology might be built into the ASP.NET 3.0 controls. For now, it's just a technology preview... with an official release within a few months after Whidbey. I still believe the Atlas control declarations on the ASPX page (and even in the JS) are still way too verbose - but then again so was XAML at PDC2003. Shunta even made a comparison to XAML in how they reduced it's verbosity (eg. atlas:control.subtype) as a possibility for future ATLAS releases. All I can say here is that Atlas is going to lift up ASP.NET programming to be more powerful that WinForms or SmartClient apps. A new class of app will evolve from this, and not even XAML apps (hosted in a future version of IE) will be as cool.

SQL Server 2005 now comes with the SQLCLR. Enterprise Studio will replace both Enterprise Manager and Query Analyzer - but I knew all that before going to the PDC. It's Project LINQ where the real DB magic comes into play. This ADO.NET 2.0 capability is what Anders' was trying to sell us at PDC2003 - a unified method for querying any type of data from within .NET. You don't have to use a static non-OOP aware language like T-SQL to query data. This can be a great thing... but shouldn't be overused.

Office 12 gains a new task-based UI, but they are still going to be client apps - not a web app like many have thought they were moving too (probably because they will finally have a Unix-like XDisplay capability built into Vista, called RAID). Hotmail, thankfully, will finally see an overhaul with an AJAX-type OWA look-alike to compete with GMail and the upcoming Y!Mail.

Longhorn Server will be released in 2007 and will include IIS7 and RAID (Remote Applications Integration Layer). IIS7 is going to take the market by storm. I believe the granularity of administrative control, ease of management (XML config's and changes don't require a restart of IIS), and pluggable modules is going to setup IIS7 to totally dominate the market. Considering that IIS has had ZERO critical vulnerabilities since the 6.0 release in 2003, how will Apache even be able to compete?

Tags: [PDC05]